The Impact of Consumers’ Ethnic Disidentification and Cosmopolitanism on Multicultural Advertising

Abstract The aim of this research was to explore the influence of ethnic disidentification (i.e., an anti-ingroup trait) and cosmopolitanism (i.e., a pro-outgroup trait) on three advertising approaches (i.e., match, mismatch, and multi-ethnic approach). This study involved an online survey and was held in a university in the southwestern U.S. Respondents were first exposed to a set of questions regarding their need to belong and disidentification toward their ethnic group consumption behavior. Subsequently, respondents were asked to look at an ad and express their attitude toward the ad and brand attitude, as well as consumers’ purchase intention. After the data collection, three blocks (i.e., matched, mismatched, and multi-ethnic) were created by comparing the ethnicity of the models in the ad with the ethnicity of the respondents. The results showed that the effect of cosmopolitanism on attitude toward the ad was significant only for ads that featured multi-ethnic models (unlike the ones featuring matched models). Moreover, consumer disidentification did not exhibit any significant influence for any of the three advertising approaches (i.e., multi-ethnic, matched, and mismatched, approach).